Search This Blog

On the Book of Revival

Looking at a tract of
forests, I hardly believed that this was once an open, degraded patch of land
reminiscent of a rainforest that stretched beyond the mountains. The
photographs we saw, and the photographs we took, showed a stark contrast: in
the beginning, it was a bramble of invasive herbs and shrubs, suffocating
native trees and forbidding their growth. Fifteen years on, a canopy of tall
trees races skywards in a thunderstorm-like profusion, chasing the heights
their ancestors once achieved in another age. What began as a story of lost
faith appeared to be rising in hope, and the plot of the story we missed in
between, of upheaval and invasion, resurrection and renewal – a crucial mass of
any story – we were fortunate to listen to from the caretakers who helped revive
this story.

The forest, to the left, was restored 15 years ago to create a contiguous patch of corridor joining the rainforests beyond.

The stalwarts have now
passed the quill to nature, and this fragment which borders a road on one side
and rows of tea plantations on the other, now writes for itself. A small signage
alerts us that this story we are witness to is as much of wild animals as it is
of the trees, and an ant tells me that she, as much as the elephant, has a
claim to this story, a revival of a lost book.

The plains burn hot
under soles. After losing count of the coconut orchards on the plains of
Palghat, we zip across NH 209 as the tall terraces of the Western Ghats loom
distantly in the southern horizon. Like titans, dark and brooding whose heads are
held up high, they grow in stature for every mile we cover. It was long ago
that I strained my neck to look up to a mountain demanding respect and awe,
praise and prayer. In these mountains lies a story whose dimensions are beyond
our comprehension; a story being written by forces of nature that we cannot entirely
understand.

Approaching the Elephant Hills of the southern Western Ghats.

The strata of the
Elephant Hills are distinct. If it were a book, it would be written in at least
five different volumes, each covering a multitude of stories that cannot be
read in one lifetime. The only way to browse through this book is a two-lane
road which wearily guides us through it. It first climbs through the mixed
deciduous forests of the foothills, slowly rising, meter-per-meter, to the
semi-evergreen pockets of river-carved slopes where the air begins to cool down,
at which point it passes through the sheer cliffs where the grass is grazed by
the Nilgiri Tahr, to the gentle slopes of evergreen forests that deepen the
shadows, gradually giving way to the tall-canopied, blue-green hued rainforests
that crown the mountains. It goes all the way beyond the frost-line that
forbids tree-growth and nurtures nimble grass strands on the precipice. If it
were a book, it would be an epic of unproportionable scale.

Man made his first
mark in this book more than a hundred years ago, although his presence in the
book was made more than a thousand years ago when tribal communities settled in
these natural galleries. Today, every volume of this ancient book is marked, in
an insoluble ink, by man. Perhaps the most significant mark was left by timber
fellers and then by pioneering planters of coffee and tea, creating a mosaic of
land-use patterns never before seen in the book. And as a black strip was drawn
across its pages for our ease of traversing, we introduced many more stories,
exotic as well as anthropogenic, mending the great epic for our desires.

The mountains are like books, every page written by its residents -
human and non-human alike.

Every time you pass
through this black strip, you will be witness to a history lost in present era,
in the form of fragments and remnants of rainforests – the original story –
amidst a sea of tea plantations – the new story – witnessing the endemic and
threatened wildlife – the original storytellers – who, out of necessity or
reluctance that I cannot tell, traverse through the new story to get to the old
story where they try to continue their writings. I still wonder how this book
holds and not fall apart.

There are now three
distinct parts of the old story: degraded, restored or under restoration, and undisturbed
forests which retain most of its natural finesse and are more-or-less pristine.
The new-age human writers are trying to hold together the old story by keeping
the cord of the book strong: by restoring degraded forests, connecting isolated
fragments, and strengthening the remnants. On the other hand, they are also
working to combine the old story with the new, by reinstating the faith among
people for the original writers, and, in a world where natural revival is but a
little bud on a large tree, are the binders of the old and the new story.

Rainforests hard to describe.
You see them in different perspectives from different angles. You will perceive
it differently than I do. You would describe it differently if you were
standing in the middle of it and your description would be different if you
were viewing it from the skies. You would call it something in the day,
something else in the night. It would be described differently by smells,
sounds, textures, colours, and emotions. A rainforest is as much Kafka as it is
Tolkien, it is Leopold as it is Thoreau. Perhaps the words of John Keats in an
Ode to a Nightingale capture the essence of rainforests although written in a
distantly-related context:

Standing in the middle
of the old and the new pages, I was overwhelmed by the forces that drive this
story. When I looked up, I saw a Malabar giant squirrel feeding on jackfruit,
dislodging seeds to the ground where they would begin own story. By a dense
strand of trees, a troop of lion-tailed macaques and another of Nilgiri langurs
catapulted from one tender branch to another. Beyond the valley, a flock of
hornbills fed on inconspicuous fruits, allowing the seedlings to see a wider
world. Every morning, a pair of Malabar Whistling Thrush would sing notes from
their ancient scriptures, recited even today after thousands of years and more.

The story-tellers of the undergrowth. Clockwise: Epipogium roseum, a Tachinid, a Stratiomyid,
a tiger beetle (Jansenia venus), and a Rhagionid.

The most secretive of
writers lurked in the undergrowth. A weevil that once laid an egg in Litsea stocksii when it was blooming has
now grown into a nail-sized grub, encased in the empty shell of the seed, its
story cut short by that of the weevil. And there was Epipogium roseum, an orchid with its own unique story of living a
saprophytic life on the rich rainforest floor. And there were flies – the Tachinids
with their rapturous attention to parasitize the leaf-munching Scarab beetles,
the Stratiomyids with their efficiency of churning leaf litter to nourishing
humus, the Rhagionids – the oldest recorded Brachyceran flies of Gondwanaland (Mostovski
and Jarzembowski, 2000) – hunting along the understorey forests, and the
high-altitude tiger beetles, Jansenia
venus, formed some of the many understorey storytellers of a rainforests.

Then there were, among
the most beautiful of rainforest residents, the golden wood ant (Polyrhachis allaudata), which went about
exploring trees and leaves, grass and ground. The rare trap-jaw ant (Anochetus cf obscurior), with its trap-like jaws that are kept open and snapped
shut while catching prey, are something of a specialty of rainforests. Among
the leaves was a scout of Diacamma
ants running in-tandem to find food – collecting tales of their adventures of
hunting, and there were Jerdon’s jumping ant (Harpegnathos slatator) – the most inquisitive of ants – whose
curiosity is as keen as that of a myrmecologist’s, wandering as lone rangers up
a tree or down a forest floor exploring nooks and crevasses. All of them, from
ants to elephants, moss to trees, individually and as a community, are
scribbling stories in a language compiled in a book by nature.

And there were others
who’re writing their own tangential stories. The most persuasive of all were
the bracken fern (Pteridium sp) which
spread as wildfire after a fire has devoured a tract of land. It expands its
flame-like leaves in a toxic green conflagration, rendering the land useless
for grazers, browsers, and challenges the revival. It can also be seen along
disturbed forest edges, seemingly in low numbers but in an ever-frenzy state of
temperament. Lantana camara, Eupatorium, and Wedelia are among other exotic invasive shrubs. Perhaps the most
intriguing of stories is of silver oak (Grevillea
robusta), umbrella tree (Maesopsis
eminii) and Eucalyptus spp., all
of them introduced intentionally; silver oak to provide sparse shade to the tea
plantations, umbrella tree to provide dense shade to coffee plantations, and
Eucalyptus to be used as fuelwood for plantation colonies. Among these, the
umbrella tree found its way into the diet of a number of wild species, from
hornbills to langurs to ants, and have since dispersed across the landscape as
missionaries.

In all this, the story
of coffee and tea is something of a hallmark. When timber felling began in this
landscape, a pioneering colonialist envisaged the hills and plateaus as a site
for tea and coffee. A planter was then tasked with the plantation of coffee,
for which the forest floor had to be wiped clean – a beetle that infested a
seed, then, looked minuscule to the scale of damage done to the rainforests.
Another was assigned with clearing entire hillsides to plant rows of tea and to
replace the native trees with silver oaks.

Alternating between a
cup of the most delicious coffee and chai, I faced the
unscrupulous diner’s dilemma. This n-player
game theory envisages the predicament of diners who decide to split the check
equally among everyone so that the expenses remain relatively low compared to
what it would be if they were eating alone. Some decide to order an expensive dish
because the cost of the dish would be smaller for the person ordering it,
however, cumulatively, they all will end up paying a certain additional amount.
Logically, this means that they are getting by worse at the cost of one or two
expensive dishes than they would have had they all ordered a cheaper meal. In
other words, they all ended up paying an extra amount which lightened their
pockets even when they mostly ate cheaper food.

In an ecological
perspective, this dilemma can be viewed as thus: there are only two items at
the table, coffee and tea, and their purchasing cost is the damage they do to
an already threatened ecosystem. A group of friends are sitting by the table
thinking whether to order tea or coffee. Coffee-drinkers say that coffee is a
cheaper option because it grows under the canopy of trees, making its expense
on the ecosystem lesser than tea which grows only under a sparse canopy. The
tea-drinkers argue that coffee also requires clearing of the forest understorey,
making what looks like a rainforest from top to be devoid of any natural regeneration
below. In essence, both come at a significant cost, putting them in a dilemma. No
matter what they drink, there are going to be repercussions. What would they
order? I call this a drinker’s dilemma, and thought for long as I sipped my
choice of drink, wondering if it had any impact on the ecosystem I was learning
to revive and conserve.

Left: A profile of tea plantation showing sparse tree cover and undergrowth.
Right: A profile of coffee plantation with a canopy cover of umbrella tree (Maesopsis eminii) and sparse undergrowth.

Fortunately, there are
trade-offs. If the coffee or tea they order comes from an old plantation site,
if native trees cover is retained, if it is grown organically, if the planters
ensure no further spread of plantations or destruction of existing rainforests
and contribute to wildlife conservation, the coffee or tea they drink would
have little, if not zero, impact on present day ecosystems if we exclude the
historic expense to the rainforests.

Worth a cup: what appears to be an out-of-place herd of gaur is actually at home socialising and feeding in the undergrowth
of an organic tea plantation site, with a man trying to keep his cattle from venturing too close to them.

There is a leeway to
promote organic coffee and tea under the Rainforest Alliance. There are instances of private planter
companies engaging in restoration, conservation, and human-wildlife conflict mitigation, all of which, or in part, make coffee as well
as tea less expensive on the ecosystem. With this, the drinker’s dilemma of
whether to go for coffee or tea can be resolved, what remains is the perpetual
coffee versus tea debate which no game theory can fix!

While exploring and
learning the intricacies of restoration from the stalwarts of India’s
rainforest restorers, we came to realise that a site of restoration never
reaches the scale of an undisturbed site. This has a lot to do with abiotic
dynamics as it has to do with the biotic community that replaces the original.
Think about it like this; could you, if you erased a chapter from your book,
rewrite it word-to-word again?

In this ancient book, hidden
in the cloud forests, there are still stories to be found – as much as they are
to be conserved – whose narrative yet remains unknown. The one I narrate here
is of an ant in the corner of a tea estate. Brachyponera
is an inconspicuous, small black ant in the subfamily Ponerinae. About six
species have been recorded in India so far, with one, B. luteipes, documented in Tamil Nadu (Bharti et al, 2016).

As is my wont, any
insect would distract me even in the most interesting of conversations, and a
worker Brachyponera that scampered
between my feet was no exception. I found it rather curiously shaped: it was
longer and stouter than the cosmopolitan black crazy ant (Paratrechina longicornis) or the wood-dwelling white-footed ghost
ant (Technomyrmex albipes). The
fellow I was looking at also had a rather prominent, large head.

Brachyponera sp., carrying "something" in its mouth.

After closer
inspection I realised that it was carrying something in its mandibles, perhaps
transporting food or pupa from one location to another. I then tapped gently on
the ant and instead of finding one dead ant – I apologise for doing so, but the
ant was unhurt and the tap was to gently loosen what she was carrying – it
transformed into two ants scampering on the ground. Losing my focus on the
conversation which continued with me crouching on the floor, I sought another
ant to tap – and it, too, transformed into two! And then third. Three ants
turned to six. All these individual ants had a normal-sized head. Surely it
wasn’t food that they were carrying, neither pupa or a recently metamorphosed
ant – since these would have been lying stationary. Were they, then,
piggy-backing another fellow ant? It was implausible, but not too far-fetched.

Ten years ago, Guenard and Silverman (2011) also observed this piggy-backing behaviour in
a closely related species of this ant, Asian needle ant (B. chinensis), a native of south-east Asia, and titled it ‘tandem
carrying’. This behaviour, the authors later studied, was earlier recorded from
Japan in 1988, however it remained unknown until as recently as 2011 when their
findings were published.

Tandem carrying: a worker 'carrier' ant gives a ride to its companion to the site of food. The rider attains an up-side-down
foetal position so that it can be carried safely (and comfortably?) by the carrier.

Tandem carrying is one
of the strategies of foraging observed only in Brachyponera. Other, more common, ways are solitary foraging, as observed
in Jerdon’s jumping ant; tandem running, as observed in some Diacamma sp.; group foraging, as observed
in Pharaoh ants (Monomorium pharaonis),
the small red ants we see commonly in kitchens; and mass foraging, observed in
army ants (Aenictus sp.) as they go
about in large numbers scouting for food. Tandem carrying is quite a
tender-hearted strategy of foraging, and the term probably comes from ‘tandem
babywearing’ – a convenient way parents strap babies by the belly to carry them
around. A worker ant does exactly that, except that instead of carrying babies,
they carry their sisters!

This strategy, the
study showed, works like this: if a lone forager comes across a food item that
is too large for it to carry, it traverses back to its nest. That of our ant
was located between rocks, hidden under leaf litter. It communicates with its
sisters and then gives a ride to one. It is not known how they do it, but the
rider attains a ‘foetal’ position and is lifted by the carrier in its mandibles,
exactly in a way it would transport pupa – up-side-down. The carrier, who is
familiar with the pheromone trail leading to the food item, carries the rider
to the spot. The rider alights, probably thanks its companion, and they both get
to work.

Brachyponera ants towing a large-sized earthworm to their nest. The rider alights, and helps the carrier in carrying food.

The argument for this
strategy is that it conserves the energy of one ant at the expense of another.
While the total sum of energy saved would be higher than if both the ants were
to scout for food, the carrier ant must suffer greater energy loss – perhaps
even at the cost of its life – than the rider. If this is just a mathematical
strategy of energy conservation used by the ants after millions of years of
trial-and-error, then there is no reason why it would not be adopted by other
species. But, if I stretch the narrative a bit more, this shows altruistic
behaviour by the carrier, at an expense of its energy, to not only conserve its
rider’s energy but also collectively of the entire colony’s. If so, then this
is yet another example of genetically-induced sentience among what we commonly
– and often incorrectly – consider lower
lifeforms.

The tandem carrying
behaviour has been noted in Japan in B.
nakasujii and in USA in B. chinensis,
and this happens to be a first for India, but questions remain on the identity
of the ant. Dr Guenard, the co-discoverer of this foraging strategy, told me
that Brachyponera is a complex genus
requiring detailed observations to identify the species, hence any guesses at
this ant from Tamil Nadu will remain obscure for now. He also said that tandem
carrying might actually be common in this genus.

On the nature of daylight - a coffee plantation is often used by elephants as corridors.
Only a few seconds before this photograph was clicked, a lone tusker passed under the morning haze.

This ant, among many
others, hints at the magnificence of the rainforests, that their narrative is
as much a part of the landscape as that of their counterparts, the elephants,
and how little we know about them. There are pages to be added, new narratives
to be explored, and it appears to be a perpetual book of nature that gets
rewritten, reworded, often torn or renewed.

Seeds of evergreen tree species rescued from roadsides and given a chance to prosper in rainforest nurseries.
Clockwise: Elaeocarpus tuberculatus, E. serratus, Litsea stocksii, and Diospyros nilgirica.

To find that there is
a book on revival being compiled, seed-per-seed, hectare-per-hectare, in
harmonious co-existence between man and nature, is a hope that this grand epic
earnestly needs. With leech-socks or without, in boots or in chappals, in heat
as in rain, nature requires as much of restoration as it does of conservation,
for we can only conserve so much, but restore so much more.